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But they also dreamed in advance about the little things, including the happy or just haphazard things, that punctuated their lives. They dreamed about things like births, reconnecting with an old friend, seeing a rare animal, committing a social faux pas, needing to deal with a plumbing problem, or reading some really interesting story in a magazine or online.

By “they,” I mean regular people from all walks of life, ordinary dreamers. We are all ordinary dreamers, even if we don’t tend to remember our dreams, or only do so once in a blue moon. Dreaming is something we do at least two hours a night, possibly even the whole night. It’s thrilling, sometimes life-changing, when we realize that we may in fact be time traveling in our sleep, actually interacting with our future.

In her second year of university, Valerie*1 had a vivid dream that her parents’ house had been burgled and that men were in the house. It was striking enough that she called her mother the next day to tell her—something unusual at that point in her life, as her limited budget didn’t allow her to call home more than once every couple weeks.

“When I described my dream, my mum went quiet and said, ‘Have you been speaking to your sister?’” Valerie’s sister, who was at another university, had called their mother the same day, having also dreamed (the same night) of a burglary at their parents’ house—although details of the two dreams were different. “We agreed this was quite weird and left it there.”

But two days later, Valerie’s mother called her and said, “Your dream came true.” She explained that burglars had ingeniously “entered” the house using a fishing rod to take the car keys off a side table by the door and had stolen their car. Some neighbors’ houses were burgled the same night, in most cases through actual physical entry. It was evidently an organized gang of thieves operating in the neighborhood. It was the first time their house had been burgled in twenty-eight years living there—and it seemed that both Valerie and her sister had gotten a whiff of this rare event a few days beforehand in their dreams.

This was just one of several precognitive dream experiences that Valerie sent me. Readers of my blog The Nightshirt and my previous book Time Loops frequently email me such stories—I love to hear them. And after I’ve had a couple drinks at parties and admit that I spend my free time writing about ESP, acquaintances are often forthcoming with their own stories about life-changing brushes with precognition.

For example, knowledge of his inner, secret time traveler has been a kind of talisman for Ray, a radio producer in his late twenties I met at a Washington, DC, social event. After his bottom baby teeth fell out in second grade, two of his adult teeth came in double for some reason, and he had to have them removed. The night before his dental surgery, he dreamed the extraction was already over (Sigmund Freud would call that wish fulfillment) and that his dentist gave him a little box containing his extracted teeth. “When I opened the box, one of the teeth was a tiny little square,” he said. “The other tooth was long and pointy and spear-like. It looked like an animal tooth.”

The next morning his parents brought him in for his surgery; he was put under anesthetic and awoke when it was over. “Just like my dream, my dentist gave me a little box containing my extracted teeth. And the contents of the box were identical to what I’d foreseen in my dream the night before. The second tooth was so long because it contained the root of the tooth.” Like most second graders, Ray didn’t know that teeth had roots, so this was quite surprising. But way more surprising was the fact that he’d dreamed the whole scene the night before.

Two decades later, Ray says this experience had a huge impact on him. “Realizing I could predict the future with my dreams was beyond exciting. It made me feel like a mutant from X-Men. Like I had this secret power that no one else could comprehend.” It colors his life to this day. “I still think I have some of that power!”

He’s right—he does still have that power. In fact, I believe we all do.